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Bestseller lists are hugely important to authors so whether they actually provide a lift in sales (they probably do) or are in anyway an accurate measure of books sold (they measure only velocity not actual sales over a length of time), they matter to authors and publishers who are the ones who control the ebook production.
As long as it is believed that ebooks can possibly hurt an authors' chances of getting on a major list, this belief will hinder the production of ebooks and, I believe, the price of ebooks.
As for JS Wolf's query about buying books and not reading them - welcome to the world of the genre romance reader. Nearly every woman I know that reads genre romance has a "TBR" pile (To Be Read). We buy books upon recommendations and impulse and then end up not reading them for years. I probably buy 10 books a month that I won't read. It's a compulsion, a weird one, to be sure, but a compulsion none the less.
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